Monitoring is an issue of primary concern in current and next-generation network systems. The objective of sensor networks is to monitor their surroundings for a variety of important applications, such as atmospheric conditions, wildlife behavior, and troop movements, among others. Monitoring in data networks is critical not only for accounting and for management, but also for detecting anomalies and attacks. Such monitoring applications are inherently continuous and distributed and usually introduce a significant communication overhead.
Consequently, there is a pressing need to identify the fundamental problem of thresholded counts and to address this problem by setting local thresholds at each monitoring node and initiating communication only after the locally observed data exceeds these local thresholds.